I recently had the pleasure of presenting on esports at The Lowry Academy, alongside Kalam Neale from the British Esports Federation. I have long been a believer in the potential for esports to be a positive vehicle for supporting student engagement but also the development of a lot of the soft skills that are important in life beyond school, including leadership, resilience, and teamwork to name but a few. It was therefore great to be able to share but also even better to hear what the staff and students at The Lowry Academy, alongside 3 other United Learning Salford schools are all doing in relation to esports.
In terms of my presentation I would like to just share some of my thoughts and 5 pieces of advice in relation to esports, based on my experiences at Millfield, and as shared at the event.
It is not all neon lights
When you think of esports and when you look at professional events it’s all neon lights and high-powered PCs, expensive gaming keyboards, mice and headsets. From the point of view of schools, this is difficult to square away especially where funding is often limited. Although creating such environments may have its advantages it isn’t a requirement. When we launched esports at Millfield we had a couple of IT labs which needed to be updated, plus we were moving to standard desktops rather than the overpriced all-in-ones we had previously. We knew that the labs needed to be appropriate for Computing teaching and we didn’t want to distinguish these rooms from our other IT labs which weren’t up for replacement. As such, in looking to prepare to deliver some esports provision we basically increased the spec of the PCs in terms of the graphics card, processor and memory, but opted to keep it in the same PC chassis we normally used. So, we had two labs with PCs capable of running Overwatch 2, League of Legends and other esports games but the labs themselves didn’t look any different to other IT labs. I note the higher-spec machines had other potential benefits beyond esports in terms of software they could run to support Computing, Art and other subjects. That said, later when we started looking at esports and Rocket League in particular at our prep school we simply used the i5, 8Gb PCs we already had, and this worked fine.
Small is good
Now our upgrade work involved two labs as these labs were up for refresh anyway and therefore all we were doing was increasing the cost a little in line with higher spec machines however there is no need to go full lab. If looking at Rocket League for example it might be ok to have only 3 machines to run a team playing against other schools, or maybe have 6 machines to allow two internal teams to play off against each other. You can scale the equipment based on your available financial resources combined with your anticipated interest in your planned esports provision.
Beware updates
One thing that has snagged me a few times, usually after a holiday period has been game updates. Myself and the students have rocked up ready for a bit of Overwatch 2 for example, following the easter break to find each machine needs a 6 or 7Gb update. Queue a wait before you can get a match started and queue my network team asking what the hell is eating up all of our internet bandwidth suddenly. As such it is well worth planning to check and update games towards the end of holiday periods to reduce the risk. The game vendors might still release an update but hopefully by keeping on top of things it will be a smaller rather than cumulative update, and therefore a lesser delay.
Consumables
We haven’t provided any fancy keyboards or mice, which may make us a little less competitive, but it means where there is wear and tear we can quickly replace it. That said I haven’t seen significant issues with keyboards and mice, however where we have used controllers, these seem to suffer wear and tear and therefore factoring this in to allow for occasional replacement is well advised. In terms of headsets, the key is to avoid going too cheap, ideally spending a bit more on good headsets, which therefore, with careful treatment by students, are likely to last longer. I learned this lesson in relation to headsets as an IT teacher years ago, that spending a bit more makes sense and that savings in the short term, on cheaper headsets, often ends up more expensive in the longer term.
Work across year groups
Initially, when I looked at esports I focused very much on getting students in teams with their peers, in the same age group and year group. This, in hindsight, is I believe a mistake. I had some issues with low-level behaviour and with the engagement of some students. As soon as I put students together across year groups it worked much better and I also think it required students to develop their communication and collaboration skills more, given they were having to work with students who may be younger and older, but towards a common aim of winning their match. I would therefore recommend any esports provision allows students to work across year groups, although within reason.
Conclusion
The FE colleges are doing some amazing things in relation to esports, often spurred on by offering esports BTecs as a programme of study. Schools lag behind but the potential benefits are the same and the cost of getting involved is minor. You don’t have to have a room painted black, with neon strip lights, expensive gaming chairs and £2000+ PCs. All you need is a couple of PCs with the appropriate specification and you can get started. It was great to hear from Lowry Academy and some of the other United Learning schools in relation to their recent pilot of esports and their Rocket League competition across 4 schools. The student enthusiasm was obvious for all to see. I can only hope that following this event more schools get involved. I look forward to continuing to support the growth of esports in schools and seeing more schools pick up on the potential which esports has to offer.
Technology and Learning 